The Iconic School

What is - or should be - distinctive about Christian schools? Keynote speech delivered to Lichfield Diocesan Board of Education, 2019

Which is more beautiful? A sunset, or a rubbish tip? It’s not a trick question. Trust your instincts.

Most people will say the sunset is the more beautiful picture. But often, there will be someone who puts their hand up to say that actually, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. That it’s purely a matter of taste.

But if beauty is purely in the eye of the beholder – if it is purely subjective and matter of the arbitrary expression of human will –  then beauty is basically democratic: what is beautiful simply becomes what the greater number of people choose to call beautiful. There is no transcendent value of beauty, beyond human definition. Beauty is what humans define it as. If more people say that the rubbish tip is more beautiful than the sunset, then so it is.

There is a lot at stake here. If this is true, then beauty can be redefined at will, along with its correlate, the good. If there is nothing intrinsically beautiful good about the natural landscape, if its beauty and goodness are purely subject to human utility and human will –  then why not raze and destroy it? Why not pave paradise, pollute the oceans, make use of animals as we see fit?

What’s more, if we can define the world as Beautiful or ugly, good or bad purely according to the will of the majority or the most powerful, then there is nothing to stop us redefining the value of human lives, either. If there is no transcendent goodness or beauty, if these are subject purely to the human will, then we can define people as good and beautiful, or bad and ugly, too. Which in turn would allow us to define it as a good thing to eliminate or even exterminate those the popular will has designated ugly and evil: perhaps Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, Freemasons, the genetically deficient, the darker skinned. Sure, there may be a minority who fail to see the good of what we are doing in the pogroms and the death camps; but if the beauty and goodness are purely a matter of taste, then all we need to do is eliminate those with different tastes until only one taste remains.

This all assumes, of course, that we are the highest intelligence in this world. That’s maybe so for now. Yet already we can conceive of intelligent beings far more intelligent than ourselves, whether genetically and technologically enhanced humans or artificial intelligence. If beauty and goodness are indeed determined by the will of the highest extant intelligence, it might make us wonder just what use a community of digital minds or superhumans would have for the biological environment, for animals – for us. If we can define beauty and goodness by the value of things to us, and establish this definition purely by the exercise of power, then why shouldn’t they? And will there be any room in their ideal landscape for us? Will we become the bad, the ugly, useless, the burdensome parent, the genetically deficient relative, the unwanted child? Food for thought.

We think that there is something new about our so-called “post-truth ” age, where beauty and goodness are defined by the exercise of will or by their collectively assumed market value, but actually, it’s been a long time coming: at least 800 years, and possibly 2400 at a stretch. You don’t need me to tell you about the deleterious effect that it is having on the people of this world, the West especially, and arguably millennials more than most.

Today, I am going to sketch out a family tree of the ideas that have led us to this position; I will argue that relativism is fundamentally a western problem, spreading throughout the rest of the world via the “incarnation” of Anglo-American analytical philosophy in the power structures of global capitalism, but that there is in the history of western thought a solution to it; and finally, to suggest the role that the Church and in particular church schools can play in putting things right.

The icon  is the key to what I’m about to say. So let’s stop and think for a moment about what an icon is. What’s the most common, day-to-day sense in which we use that word?

We sometimes talk about fashion icons, or sports icons, people as icons, but most commonly, I suspect we think of the icons on our computers or our mobile phones. And these are not the worst ways of understanding what an icon means in Christian tradition. A computer icon is a small picture that opens into something bigger: an application. And so, the Christian icon is meant to open into a greater reality than the one which you see in it.

To speak of David Beckham (showing my age) as a “football icon” is to suggest that he represents some kind of ideal of footballing. And indeed, the Christian icon is a representation in humble matter of an ideal greater than itself: a transcendent reality in the mind of God. An icon is a block of wood, a piece of matter, painted in images which is meant to lead us to the unimaginable, the eternal and the uncreated: an invitation into the mind of God.

This is perhaps most easily illustrated by Rubilev’s famous icon, commonly known as the Trinity. Trinity Lewisham School, a Church school which serves an area of considerable racial and social diversity, has made this icon a focus for its vision and values: a start point for meditating upon the inherent diversity in unity of the God who is three in one, and going further still in perceiving that at the table represented in the icon, there is always room for the guest and stranger. This reading of the icon formed part of the vision which helped the last headmaster, Father Richard peers, now Director of Education in Liverpool Diocese, to transform what was considered a failing and antisocial school into one where the pupils love being there so much that they now choose to stay after hours to get their work done; where standards of respect for self and other are high; where the Christian faith is unapologetically celebrated with daily form eucharists and has without doubt radically changed the outlook of the children and the staff there. Through collective meditation upon an icon, the school itself has become an icon for the community it serves: created, material, real, and yet a window into that beauty and goodness which transcends the arbitrary whim of people with power.

And yet with the icon comes a danger, a suspicion, of something else with which it is all too easily confused. Because while we may talk of fashion icons, sports icons, music icons, do we not also talk, as though the terms were interchangeable, of fashion, sports and music idols?

Take our own cathedral here in Lichfield. Hanging over the nave altar is an icon written last year, in 2018, blessed on Holy Cross day by the Bishop. Yet less than four centuries ago, from 1649 to 1616 in the dark years of Cromwell’s Commonwealth, the Cathedral was being used as a garrison by parliamentarian, Puritan soldiers. Images were smashed and destroyed. Even after the restoration of the monarchy, the use of images here would remain controversial, and among many Protestants, it still is.

We can go back further still, to the eighth century iconoclastic controversy of Byzantium, when Emperor Leo III began an attack on the use of religious images in churches for very practical reasons: the new religion of Islam was winning imperial ground. And if Islam was winning, surely that meant that Christianity must have been getting something wrong, that God was on the Muslim side. Some Christians noticed that one of the most prominent theological divisions between Islam and their own religion was in the use of images: Islam banned outright all the heavenly depictions that adorned the walls of Christian churches. And after all, did the old Testament Law not forbid the making of graven images, too? Perhaps God was punishing the Christians for idolatry. So, Leo decreed, the images must go.

Ironically, it was the theological enterprise of a scholar living outside the boundaries of the Byzantine Empire under Muslim rule which argued forcibly ineffective of the iconographic tradition and one of the restoration of icons to the Eastern Church. S. John of Damascus defended icons on the basis that scripture itself is full of images, albeit drawn in words; and fundamentally, that in the Incarnation, the Word became flesh, the uncreated became created. Christ is the perfect image of God in that he participates absolutely in both divinity and humanity; consequently, the image of God in which all humans share, but which was damaged in our fall from grace, is reconstituted and perfected in him.

But importantly, it is not only in humans that the image of God can be perceived. S. John reminds us that Jesus was baptised in created matter: the water of the Jordan. Jesus was himself a woodworker, a craftsman of matter, and died on created matter.  He lived and moved and had his being in created matter, by his presence he blessed matter, and through matter, through the wood of the Cross, did he redeem matter. S. John argues that this reveals matter itself as a kind of icon. In short, matter matters: because it is only throughmatter that we can participate in God. The universe of passing things is itself a window which God has given us that we might glimpse eternity.

The difference between and idol and an icon is that an idol reveals nothing beyond itself. To contemplate an icon is to see through an image, through something created, a revelation of the unknowable and inconceivable uncreated divinity. To worship an idol is to give homage to the image itself, to acknowledge it as the ultimate reality, and to say that beyond it there is nothing more.

I fear that idolatry is where we in the West are with the world today.

For the first millennium of Christian thinkers, influenced like S. John Damascene by a mixture of the Platonic thought of the ancient world and the contemplative prayer of monastic communities, the world was an icon of the mind of God; the world was creation, as an ongoing gift from God in which anyone (whether Christian or not) could glimpse something of God through contemplation – but which was fully revealed only in the self-giving sacrificial love of Christ yielding his life for the world on the Cross. The idea of somehow separating creation from creator, seeing the world as sufficient in itself rather than as a gift with a giver, was alien to their mindset. The world was an icon.

And then, through mediaeval Christian ‘interaction’ with Islam (to put it very euphemistically), the works of Aristotle, lost for centuries, were rediscovered in the West. Islamic scholars had been keeping Aristotle’s thought alive for centuries, but to the mediaeval scholars it was radically new, and profoundly challenging: because for Aristotle, the world could and indeed should be understood in its own right, as something quite separate from the divine order.

Great theologians and contemplatives like St Thomas Aquinas and St Bonaventure worked at synthesising the Platonic and Aristotelian perspectives, but by the 13th century, Plato was old hat and Aristotle was in vogue. Adopting an extreme reading of Aristotelian logic, the late mediaeval Franciscans Duns Scotus and William of Ockham  argued that being as a category preceded the concept of God, which means that God is not the grounds of being, the transcendent Good, Truth and Beauty underlying and permeating all things, but rather just the greatest being among many others.

The metaphysically dubious children’s hymn “Our God is a great big God” represents one possible (if simplified) trajectory of Scotus’ theological speculation: the notion that God is, albeit incomprehensibly so, basically an inconceivably bigger and better version of us; that the relationship between creation and God is not one of participation – we do not participate in God as though contemplating an icon – but of difference; and that the human relationship to God is not one of the contemplative sharing in the mind of God, but of the cooperation or otherwise of individual human wills with the sovereign will of God, no matter how arbitrary or inscrutable that might seem to be. Rather than that which is beyond the categories of existence and non-existence, God is to be related to as the most powerful willing agent in existence.

And so, unwittingly, these late Franciscans made straight the path towards the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, Napoleon’s dismissal of God as an ‘unnecessary proposition’ – such that by the nineteenth century, the divorce between faith and reason was effectively complete. Creation was no longer seen as a gift of God, participating in and radiating his glory, but as uninspired matter: a bare canvas of stuff on which God or humans might impose their will; not a mirror of divine reality but something to be used. Thus begins the binary of human versus the rest of creation, rather than the unity of human within creation, and the concept of “nature” as something separate from God and separate from us, even beneath us, a closed system of self-referential objects pointing to nothing beyond themselves: in short, as idols.

And that is what, in modern Western thought at least, the world remains.

Now God is very easy to eliminate from this picture of reality. After all, if God is primarily understood in terms of an inscrutable will, what is the point in trying to understand or know him? Surely goodness becomes merely the arbitrary exercise of his will – which might not look to us to be very “good” at all. And so goodness becomes something which we can define for ourselves instead, much like Adam and Eve taking the apple all over again. To trace a brief geneaological trajectory, we might say that humanism displaces God and puts humans at the centre of reality; utilitarianism continues the theme by valuing everything that is not human purely in terms of the use for humans; and capitalism becomes the economic expression of the relativisation of reality to the will of whoever has the highest purchasing power.

We are in a political situation now in this country where politics, departing from the High Toryism and Labour Christian socialism of the early to mid 20th century, has been formally evacuated of any concern for a transcendent good, and reduced to nothing more than Whiggish arguments about how wealth can be most fairly and effectively redistributed. What wealth (and, by extension, the matter which it can procure) are actually for is relegated to an entirely private concern, left to the arbitrary impulses of the individual will. We are simply expected to take for granted the consensus that the value of the material world comes down to nothing more than a market choice: that the highest human ambition, is simply the greatest possible freedom of will, achieved by the maximisation of personal wealth, and the State exists only to further this negative liberty (freedom from rather than freedom to…).

Worse, we are expected to see this relativistic perspective as the natural, neutral state of the world. We are expected to believe that this way of thinking, which has historically emerged from the specific situation of the late mediaeval rehabilitation of Aristotle in western European theology, is in some way universal, that it is the only true way of perceiving reality, and that the West is justified in exporting its worldview throughout the world and even beyond by trade buttressed with the threat of war. The irony is that the very people who censure the Church for her bloody history of going out to “convert the natives” are quite content to collude in the extermination of any mindset which is not explicitly relativistic and atheistic: in other words, the mindset of every culture which does not share the atheistic and relativistic suppositions of modern western philosophy. And the irony doubles when you realise that our philosophy is the least suited to developing any sympathetic view of how the majority of the world’s people, who stubbornly persist in adhering to a religious or spiritual tradition, understand the world.

The Church must take special care not to collude with the dominant western intellectual paradigm of relativism, the adulation of the individual will above all notions of commonality or society – we see, especially in our young, the isolation and anxiety that this can bring.  And yet the solution, it seems to me, lies not in a rejection of modernity and return to authority and assertion of the divine will, of the “us and them” attitude of the fundamentalist (whether Christian, atheist or any other). Secular relativism and fundamentalism are merely two faces of the same idol. What we need is a return to the iconic, a realisation that all that is good in the world, in humanity, even in modern criticism and scepticism, is a reflection of the transcendent Good which we call God.

So, what might this mean for Church schools?

An iconic school will firstly be one which is contemplative: that is, one which puts prayer at its heart, rather than leaving it as a peripheral and perhaps slightly embarrassing bolt-on. By this, I mean that we need to move on from the idea that prayer is simply a list of requests, as though we were petitioning some distant and remote satrap. Saying prayers, making lists, is one way of prayer, and it has its place, in putting us in the position of recipients of God’s grace: but to make it the entirety of the Christian prayer life would be a feeble dilution of the spiritual riches which Christian tradition has to offer. I’m talking about prayer as a participation in the mind of God; prayer as basking in the divine glory and letting it permeate the soul; prayer as engaging in every sense, including the imagination, immersing ourselves in the divine life and allowing ourselves to been transformed by it. The iconic school will be one whose leadership bodies pray with guided meditations when making key decisions, rather than just reducing prayer to a few words at the beginning and end of a meeting (although that would be better than nothing). It will be a school where the Eucharist is celebrated with regularity, offering the whole community the chance to open the eyes of their souls: to learn to see the divine in humble matter, so that we can also see the divine in humble humanity. It will be a school which engages deeply with the scriptures, using tried pedagogical techniques of repetition and recall to ensure that the stories which make up the faith are known, so that they might be inhabited. So the school becomes an icon of the mind of God.

Second, the iconic school will be one where all its members might learn that they are loved by God, not because God chooses to love some people (and so, by extension, not to love others…), but because God islove – and that is manifest in the loving community of the school. Where the children learn that their value is not subject to the whims and desires of other people, not defined by their usefulness to the market, but is absolute and infinite, because God has made them and dwells in them. And the same is true of everybody else, too. So the school becomes an icon of the Trinitarian nature of God, diverse not in the sense of a collection of disparate, self-defining individuals, but as a unity of persons defined by their relationship to one other.

Third, the iconic school will be one which puts its contemplation and love into action, developing a spirit of service rather than a spirit of personal utility or gain, “success” defined purely on the individual’s own terms. The school will teach right action not as a matter of the exercise of authority, doing as we’re told because “the Bible says,” a matter of enforced but ultimately external Christian values which we happen to have chosen from a packed row of ideological supermarket shelves; rather, it will be a school of Christ, who is not an example of the way, the truth and the life, but is the way, the truth and the life: the ultimate reality of divine self-giving love which we do not just copy but in which we take heart. It will be a school which seeks to serve its locality, and especially the poor and vulnerable, not for the sake of brownie points or something to put on the curriculum vitae, but to simply because it is good, and by doing good we know that we can rest peacefully in the One who is Good. So the school becomes an icon of transcendent goodness.

Fourth, the iconic school will be one which is honest enough not to collude in the erasure of identity and history promulgated to advance political or commercial interests. It will resist using the humanities purely as a vehicle to promote a social agenda, or to inculcate the myth that modernity is all wonderful and the people of the past were either evil or stupid. It will resist the teaching of religious studies as an articulation of a marketplace of ideas which can be viewed from a “neutral” secular perspective, and which boil down to nothing more than a matter of personal choice between arbitrary opinions unrelated to truth; and so it will enable genuine religious, literary and cultural literacy, even fluency, thereby giving pupils a far greater sympathy for non-western philosophies and worldviews. It will resist the reduction of education purely to the maximisation of a human being’s economic potential. So the school becomes prophetic to the world, an icon of transcendent truth.

Finally, the iconic school will be one in which its pupils find delight: in themselves, in one another, in the world around them; in which they deepen their appreciation of all these things through their own music, art, drama and creative writing, each little acts of creation which are participations in God’s ongoing work of creation. St Thomas Aquinas defines Beauty as “that which gives delight when it is perceived:” and so, the school becomes an icon of transcendent beauty.

Let me close by praying that our schools may be icons to those we serve of the transcendent beauty, goodness and truth which we call God; that we may participate in the faith, hope and love of Jesus Christ; that he might grant us the wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety and awe of the Holy Spirit. Amen.